Imperial Breakdown and the Crisis of Confederacy, 1727–1763

Abstract

From the end of Father Rale’s War in 1727 to the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, Wabanaki political interests fractured along generational and regional lines as sagamores in Massachusetts and Acadia struggled to navigate increasingly disparate geopolitical contexts. To perpetuate the gains secured in Father Rale’s War and enshrined in Dummer’s Treaty, Penobscot leaders embarked on a course of nonviolent diplomacy with the English in the late 1720s and 1730s. Warriors and hunters found themselves caught between an ocean declared off limits by their own leaders and an interior stripped of its resources by a nonsustainable fur trade. By retiring the old way of the sea for a future of imagined prosperity ashore, headmen ultimately jeopardized the economic viability and social cohesion of Wabanakia. Hastening the collapse of their Native dominion was the collapse of their French ally’s North American empire in the Seven Years’ War.